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Arroxane wondered: <<Have you heard about this?
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html Summary: Eyetracking
visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped
pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.>>
As in all of Jakob Nielsen's work, it pays to treat the findings with a
healthy measure of skepticism. Nielsen is an uncommonly bright guy, and
he's produced many important insights, but his experimental design
isn't always of the finest, and he tends to leap to conclusions that
aren't justified by the data or that are very contextually limited...
leading to a lower ratio of hits to misses than I'm comfortable with.
In this case, consider the horizontal stripes bit: The viewers move
their eyes from left to right first (that's the topmost horizontal part
of Neilson's F, or of the traditional Z)--at least in English. No
surprises thus far; we've known this for at least a century. Note that
viewers _do not_ then scan from right to left trying to read the second
line (the second bar of the F): they return their eyes to the left
margin, then scan left to right again. In short, they follow the "/"
diagonal of the traditional Z pattern. The fact that the eye-tracking
images in this article don't show this diagonal scan suggests a problem
with the experimental design: it shows dwell time, not eye movements.
It also shows that Neilson doesn't fully understand the meaning of the
Z pattern.
The context is also very limited: this is expected scanning behavior
for Web pages that use the ubiquitous pattern of a logo bar across the
top, followed by a navigation bar beneath the logo, followed by a
"palette" of clickable links across the left side. Would the eye
patterns be the same for a different design? I strongly doubt it, and
the strong variation in Neilsen's three images demonstrates this quite
nicely*: yes, you can see an F, but as Rhorschach tests repeatedly
reveal, you see what you're looking for, not necessarily what is
actually there. It's also important that once viewers learn the
structure of the page, they're likely to adapt their scanning sequence
to suit that structure: different expected structurs produce different
scan patterns.
* A typical methodological flaw in the sciences involves showing just
images that support your point rather than average images that pool all
your data and a measure of the variation hidden by those averages.
Missing from this article are the confidence intervals for these
patterns for each page view. Sometimes the degree of variation tells
you more than the mean.
The conclusions that he draws from these results (the "implications"
part) are also hardly earth-shattering. Conclusion 1, that people don't
read thoroughly, is both old news and incorrect. Neilsen is confusing
"scanning behavior" (looking for something to read and parsing the
structure of the page) with "reading behavior" (what you do once you
find what you're looking for). Anyone with any experience knows that we
should design to support both skimming (to find stuff) and reading (to
learn stuff).
Conclusion 2 is that the first two paragraphs must contain the most
important information. Again, this was old news 2000 years ago to the
Romans. Journalists variously call this "the hook", which you use to
draw people in, or a pyramid structure in which "the point is at the
top of the page"*. But does it affect what we write? Not at all. The
first few sentences of any onscreen text are no different from the
first words of any printed text: they tell us whether we've truly
found what we were seeking, and whether it's interesting enough for us
to keep reading. If we do keep reading, they provide context that
explains what we're about to read.
* You'll more commonly hear this called the "inverted" pyramid
structure, in which all the key material (what I called the point) is
loaded into one place at the top, answering all the five W's. Different
metaphors for exactly the same meaning.
How to write beyond that point depends on what kind of writing we're
doing. If we're presenting reference material or online help, we must
be concise, and provide as much information as possible right at the
start so people have to read no more than is necessary--they're not
reading this for enjoyment, so every word counts. If we're writing
novels or essays, we expect them to read top to bottom, in sequence, to
follow as we develop and expand on our plot or thesis. Different
rhetorical purposes, so different implications and requirements.
Conclusion 3 is to left-load your headings, paragraphs, and bullets.
Very good advice for headings, but again, old news: power words come
first. That's why gerunds work better than infinitives in headings: "to
[verb]" is always one word longer than "[verb]". But extending this to
paragraphs is nonsense, at least in the context of designing to support
skimming behavior. Who would carefully design each and every paragraph
so that the words at the left margin are the power words? (As soon as
the window is resized, all that hard work is lost.) The same problem
occurs with bullets. Again, he's confusing skimming behavior with what
we do once we find what we're looking for.
Then there's the fact that skimming behavior isn't nearly as simple as
Neilsen is proposing. The actual skimming pattern depends on what
catches our eye: if the first few words of a line tell us everything,
or suggest that the rest of the line won't be interesting, we move to
the next line and continue skimming. But if they provide inadequate
information for us to decide, or are interesting enough to hold our
attention, we skim farther to the right until we're satisfied. You can
see that clearly in Neilson's first image.
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